TY - JOUR
T1 - Listening to the Heart or the Head? Exploring the “Willingness Versus Ability” Succession Dilemma
AU - Richards, Melanie
AU - Kammerlander, Nadine
AU - Zellweger, Thomas
N1 - Funding Information:
We gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from Kimberly Eddleston, Marc Gruber, Jeremy Miles, Petra Moog, Sabine Rau, Karl Wennberg, and participants of the Stockholm School of Economics research seminar, the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2014, the 2014 German conference on family firms, and the Rencontres de St.-Gall 2014. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Data collection for this study received financial support from Credit Suisse, Switzerland.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019.
PY - 2019/3/12
Y1 - 2019/3/12
N2 - Incumbents typically seek a highly committed and at the same time highly competent child as a successor, yet such a candidate is often not available. Extant literature is unable to predict which desired attribute—commitment (i.e., willingness) or competence (i.e., ability)—is most important in this dilemma. Drawing from institutional logics literature, we suggest that the incumbent’s personal experiences, education, and cultural embeddedness, as much as firm-level situational stimuli, direct incumbent attention to either corporate logic, favoring competence, or family logic, favoring commitment, to guide decision-making about which family member to choose as a successor. We test our hypotheses using policy capturing with responses of 1,060 family firm owner-managers, and contribute to research on succession, family firms, and institutional logics.
AB - Incumbents typically seek a highly committed and at the same time highly competent child as a successor, yet such a candidate is often not available. Extant literature is unable to predict which desired attribute—commitment (i.e., willingness) or competence (i.e., ability)—is most important in this dilemma. Drawing from institutional logics literature, we suggest that the incumbent’s personal experiences, education, and cultural embeddedness, as much as firm-level situational stimuli, direct incumbent attention to either corporate logic, favoring competence, or family logic, favoring commitment, to guide decision-making about which family member to choose as a successor. We test our hypotheses using policy capturing with responses of 1,060 family firm owner-managers, and contribute to research on succession, family firms, and institutional logics.
KW - decision making
KW - family firms
KW - institutional logics
KW - succession
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85063047528&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0894486519833511
DO - 10.1177/0894486519833511
M3 - Article
SN - 0894-4865
VL - 32
SP - 330
EP - 353
JO - Family Business Review
JF - Family Business Review
IS - 4
ER -